First, how did you feel when you received this offer?

I received this offer in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, while everything was changing by the minute. There was this air of not knowing how the world would look tomorrow. As such, I really empathized with Akira's attitude of wanting to live in the present to the fullest, and thought that people around the world might share this idea too. I accepted the offer because I thought that this story could generate entertainment that would propel viewers to look forward to tomorrow.
Based on this concept, I focused on being as realistic as possible. During the challenging period, the awareness and values of people around the world related to the concept of pandemics changed quite drastically. Simply put, the keywords "infection" and "vaccine" became very familiar and personal for all of us. In that situation, I thought that portraying similar concepts in an unrealistic manner, even if it was fiction, would take the viewers out of the experience.
This story has a refreshing viewpoint because a world that is plagued by zombies is actually heaven for Akira. I worked closely with Eiji Akaso during the filming to carefully craft the emotional expression of his character so that viewers could accept him as a real young man in his 20s, rather than viewing his words and actions as overly eccentric. This film requires viewers to empathize with Akira, so we took every effort to ensure that they could feel a part of this world by creating a story that was more of an extension of our everyday lives.

I was surprised to see scenes of zombies swarming in real places, including Kabukicho and the Ome Kaido road.
Was it difficult to achieve these realistic scenes?

They were so tough I nearly threw up! (laughs) One of the settings in this film is a Don Quijote discount store in Kabukicho. It's unusual for such action scenes to be set in an existing store. If I start talking about how hard it was to realistically recreate the streets of Shinjuku, I'll never stop (laughs). If those of us living here and foreign visitors to Japan see these scenes and think that it doesn't look like Shinjuku, we have failed. So the art team, the CG team, the action team, and really the entire staff worked really hard on these settings. The scenes in Kabukicho, including the Don Quijote location, are a fusion of real sets and visual effects. However, I always told the staff that the details mean everything. There was no point in using a setting if it didn't look like the real thing. I also focused on how to draw out a unique Japanese quality in the zombies and locations.
So, we traced each and every real sign in Kabukicho's famous sea of neon signs and recreated the Don Quijote store with the supervision of the actual staff. Experts created the store sales displays, and the items shown are all actual products that are sold there.

Each individual zombie also seems to have a unique personality, too.

I'm a huge fan of zombie movies, from George A. Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" to the Korean film "Train to Busan." However, while zombies are well established as a type of character, each work and performance varies in terms of the details. So, I first decided on the rules for the zombies in "Zom 100." Specifically, I decided that while they cannot see, their hearing is unusually advanced. In other words, it's possible to escape from them as long as you don't make a sound, or you could lead them somewhere using sound. Based on this, the action team devised movements that are driven by hearing rather than sight.
In Japan, you can't kill the zombies using guns like in "The Walking Dead." Since you need a special license to own a firearm here, I thought about adopting an approach like "I Am a Hero," which the director of photography of this film, Taro Kawazu, also worked on. But it seemed unrealistic to have Akira and the others in their early 20s wielding guns and bows when they had only recently been university students. Then I had the idea of using sound to fight the zombies. Rather than using special weapons, if the characters could battle zombies using ubiquitous audio devices like smartphones and Bluetooth speakers, I thought it would be possible to create battles that could be understood across the language barrier.
Plus, the key phrase I told the actors was "act with the eyes." Lively eyes. Eyes that seem dead despite being alive. There is a change in Akira's eyes before and after joining the exploitative company. We have a phrase in Japanese, "eyes of a dead fish," which means that someone has a blank stare, even though they're alive. As people live, the look in their eyes may change depending on the situation, and there are countless gradations in eye color.
However, the eyes of zombies are all the same color once they stop being human. In a word, they are empty. Expressing this contrast was a main theme in this production and something I told the actors when we first met.

So everything was connected, including the actors' performances.

To contrast them with the living humans, the zombies needed to appear to lack a conscious mind. For example, when humans like us hit a wall, we will reflexively put out our arms to brace ourselves and protect our bodies. This action of self-protection is one reason humans appear to have awareness, so I had the actors, the action team and the extras avoid such movements when playing the zombies.

(Interviewer: SYO)